It’s been nine months since a flabbergasted federal judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering UCLA to stop anti-Israel protestors from banishing Jewish students from areas on campus. The judge called UCLA’s behavior “abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.” Yet it appears to have had little effect on the school, which, in a court hearing Monday, insisted that it bears no responsibility for the antisemitism it facilitated. 

“UCLA knows it broke the law, and no amount of deflection will change that,” charged the plaintiffs’ attorney, Mark Rienzi, after the court session. He condemned UCLA for challenging the order while feigning “public acts of contrition.” One of the plaintiffs, Yitzchok Frankel, a UCLA law student, responded by declaring that “Jews at UCLA deserve better than a university administration that speaks out of both sides of its mouth.” 

The California university is being accused by Mr. Frankel and his fellow plaintiffs of not merely failing to protect its Jewish students from unbridled antisemitism, but of enabling the anti-Israel activists’ exclusion scheme in the first place. UCLA helped the agitators, the plaintiffs charge, by providing them with metal barriers and instructing private security to shoo Jews away from the restricted areas, rather than ensuring their safe passage. 

Those protesters limited access to areas in the heart of campus to  students who pledged “their allegiance” to the anti-Israel cause and could procure an encampment member to “vouch” for their loyalty. The ensuing scenes would be hard to distinguish from the 1938 photograph of Nazis blocking Jews from entering the University of Vienna — only in this case, no SS officers were required. The judge overseeing the case responded with appropriate horror: 

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” That’s the fact that he called “so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.”

Judge Scarsi ruled that the administration’s shirking of responsibility toward its Jewish students was unconstitutional. He proclaimed that the Regents “are prohibited from offering any ordinarily available programs, activities, or campus areas to students” should they “know the ordinarily available programs, activities, or campus areas are not fully and equally accessible to Jewish students.”

The ruling was hailed as “hugely important” by the plaintiff’s lawyer, Mr. Rienzi, who, during a conversation with our Novi Zhukovsky in August, celebrated that “now we have a federal judge who has sent a message that I hope gets received by every public college and university in America.” We, suspecting that the university might challenge the court’s conclusion, flagged the case as “one to watch in the season ahead.” 

Since then, the Trump administration has made clear its willingness to act against universities that have failed their Jewish students. In March, Mr. Frankel’s case caught the eyes of the DOJ which, in an amicus brief, chastised UCLA for trying to “evade liability for what happened on the campus that they are supposed to lead and protect.” Mr. Rienzi noted then that the “DOJ has thrown down the gauntlet.” 

Which brings us back to Monday’s court hearing. While the school’s position on the issue appears to be unchanged, the same can’t be said for the playing field. Last month, Columbia University lost out on $400 million in federal grants. Now $9 billion in funding at Harvard University is under review. If a moral compass can’t sway the Regents at UCLA, perhaps cutting its federal funding will do the trick.